The interface of most real-time strategy games is the biggest barrier of entry for new players. Because the game genre requires managing hundreds of units and structures at once, without any way to pause the action, a transparent and easily accessible control scheme is probably more important to a successful RTS game than the graphics, story or setting.

It’s interesting to see, then, these kids from U Mass Lowell’s robotics lab hack some cheap 22-inch 3M displays to duel each other in a game of Blizzard‘s Starcraft II.

What’s most interesting here is that Starcraft II seems to play just fine in multi-touch without any hacking of the core executable. Using the twin $1,600.00 3M displays, each player has access to pretty much all the commands they need, using pinch-to-zoom and two-finger dragging to control the camera. Units are selected and built and ordered to attack just by tapping them.

Very cool, but I don’t think multitouch will necessarily make RTS games easier to access for more players, for one simple reason: being truly competitive in an RTS game isn’t about mastering the mouse, but about multitasking while remembering several dozen, sometimes intricate keyboard shortcuts. Multitouch takes a mouse out of the equation, but everything else is just as complicated as it ever was.